Just zoning out for a bit, cozily with a hot cup of your favourite drink is a lofty dream these days.

Recently got one via Clove from the UK https://www.clove.co.uk/

I was pretty nervous getting it cause did not really know how it was gonna go, and they asked for a photo of my credit card (without the secrets of course) and proof of residence, which was a bit spooky, but it’s their attempt (or so they say) at pushing back against potential scalpers.

Do check Fairphone’s community form about owning one this way though, cause there’s been other Canadians who have gotten the phone, and they have tidbits to share about. We also don’t get warranty cause we’re outside the EU AFAIK.

Yo, you just reaffirmed my idea that I thought was too wild! I have to replace this old phone of mine soon cause the battery’s dying, but I guess this thing will have to stay up for a bit, or much, longer.

Please don’t remind me. Had a colleague with a senior title who just vibecoded on our CI pipeline and it ended up blocking deployments for half a day.

The fact that this is listed for fast-tracking, or even considered a candidate at all, is, frankly, disgusting.

But isn’t that the point? If governments would cut public services to feed their own beast now, why wouldn’t they do that if we nationalize these services, so that they can then sell to people something better?

That said, I actually did not know that the CEO at CP is also on the Purolator board. Why the hell was that even allowed in the first place?

This is going absolutely nowhere. I don’t know why you’re thinking that I think the current system is better. I’ve said that I don’t believe so. What I’m also saying is that I don’t believe that governments can make sure that we won’t be on the streets either.

And you’re throwing away my arguments and conveniently forgetting about them and essentially putting me up as some kind of convenient strawman for whatever you’re trying to say. Why wouldn’t a government kick a bunch of people out so that they can build that resort for people that they know would vote for them? A “large illegal immigrant population” is simply a convenient target down south for the fascists Republicunts to channel national anger at so that the people would vote for them. While Canada isn’t as polarized as the States is, and racial tensions aren’t as high, it does exist and isn’t something to dismiss, and given the right events, it could fan the flames. And it doesn’t have to be racial. It can be on nationalistic lines, and I can guarantee you that that sentiment is definitely on the rise.

I get it. The grocery businesses and telco business that we know of exist and are local players. That has more to say about our policies for businesses, that it allows for oligopolies to fester, but it’s a weak reason to go to the extent of full nationalization imo. IMO government should not allow a singular group of people to fully control almost every facet of an industry. But governments should not have the power to stamp out its own competitors, lest it becomes the very thing we don’t like seeing now in these private companies.

And while those are examples, there are also some that’s for the other side. While not a national company, the TTC is one such example at the city + provincial level: service degradation has continued on, disruptions have become increasingly frequent, the Eglinton Crosstown is still under construction after more than 10 years (though the private sector is also to blame on this end), Line 6 is only finally here after 10+ years as well, and even with these two lines, Toronto is nowhere near the level of accessibility you’d expect of a city it’s size outside of downtown core, and it literally hasn’t changed much for the last 100 years. While the TTC isn’t to be fully blamed for these woes (because of car-centric developments that have taken over the national psyche), if you listen to transit advocates talk about the TTC, you’ll hear a lot of frustrating episodes, e.g. having outdated, error-prone rail infrastructure and repeatedly refusing to upgrade them.

And then there’s Canada Post with all its episodes, sagas even, in recent years. They’ve repeatedly refused to both improve services and pay better wages, even as the CUPW continually suggested to the management to better use their abilities.

I think this should tell us that you can’t rely on either nationalization or privatization alone. Either way has a possibility of slipping into stagnation once they’ve reached some kind of steady state.

If you’re running an infrastructure that many need, you could just say no to abusers, just like a healthy business would do.

And I know the times we’re in, but it’s just so odd to assume that businesses that serve the country are all owned and controlled by foreign companies. Why can’t a local player be in that place?

Public alternatives are fine, but they’ve generally stagnated in terms of improving their services and offerings, because, and I absolutely hate that I agree with the capitalists here even though I’m looking at it differently, at some point in their lifetime, the stability that a government-funded company offers will attract people who seek that stability without understanding how to achieve long term stability (which is to constantly improvement, instead of preserving the status quo). Income for these companies eventually drop, and we end up having to keep them afloat with tax money. That’s not necessarily a bad thing cause not all public services need to be profitable, but it’s still desirable to have them fund most of their activities on their own.

For cloud, it’s why mentioned that the government should be as removed as possible from its operations. These sorts of services can easily contain a lot of sensitive information, and the government should be kept at a healthy gap away from that data. Government-funded, yes, but let there also be a more direct mechanism from more grassroots and local organizations as well.

Oh you won’t be bleed dry by a malicious government. You’d just have literally nowhere legal for you to go. It’d make what ICE is doing down south look tame; there’d be a lot more people who believe or is made to believe that you should gtfo.

And capitalists aren’t just bleeding us dry through land and land alone. Just look at, and I’m waving my hand violently, everything else.

Your proposition is to trade one extreme for another, and all I’m telling you is that it doesn’t work. Why are we trying to jump from one pit into another?

I see a lot of comments are proposing for the nationalization of whole industries, which is somewhat concerning. There needs to be some balance, not to fatten the checks of those billionaires, and not to make the government too powerful.

For example, instead of (re-)nationalizing CN, nationalize the tracks themselves. The government can lay down tracks for places that need to be reached, and companies can then run their trains on them. It’s no different from how roads are public really. Companies can then focus on serving section of the tracks for areas that they understand best. Of course, there will be cases where there’s a need to consider if the investment from the government is worth it, cause what if they laid the tracks but no one’s willing to take advantage of that? Well, they can let companies bid, and there’s no bidder, they can choose to not take on the project. Of course, there’s always the option for the government to have its own train company to serve certain areas.

For telcos, instead of nationalizing the entire vertical, nationalize cell towers and cable paths. Allow companies to build their own towers if they so desire, but the main draw is that different providers can rely on shared infrastructure, and none of this Robelus bullshit that we have right now. Cable paths is probably odd, but these sorts of technology get changed quite often. The government can still own some cables, allowing smaller players to take advantage of those, but it would level out the playing field by a lot.

For the Internet and whole businesses within it, having our own cloud infrastructure, or AWS alternative, would be best. People can then run whatever on those. There is, of course, a concern of the government not respecting people’s privacies, and so it needs to be run somewhat independent of the government, allowing the government to set directions but not what exactly to do; sort of Crown-corp-y if you will.

In all my examples, the idea is simply this: nationalize the stuff that serve as the basis for a particular service. Think roads instead of cars.

Oh you know that people will vote for Nazi’s on a long enough timescale. The fact that we have fascists becoming governments around the world right now, and the fact that there’s some far right multinational organization working on all sorts of disinformation campaigns around the world, is already showing us the limits of democracy: if there’s a large enough group of people with that will (however small they are relative to the whole population), they will exercise everything they can to get into power; start small, underfund education and public welfare, create the environment for public anger, and then feed on that anger to make themselves government.

Anytime anyone tells me that “the people have decided”, I wince, cause people can be gullible, simply overwhelmed by (dis)information or just keeping themselves afloat, be pressured into following suit, etc. Democracy relies on the fact that people can be rational at the voting ballot, but that basis is being undermined.

And sorry, but you’ve misread that paragraph and sentence that you quoted, mostly cause of my wording (now that I look at that), and I apologize for that. I said that in the context of an anarchic society, not our current one.

I’m not promoting private ownership of land, but I fail just fail to see how allowing a single entity to manage land would be better than a more decentralized one. Having one dickhead who owns some land trying to gouge others is bad, but we can go somewhere else. If instead, we have THE dickhead who “owns” ALL of the land trying to gouge groups of people they specifically don’t like (oh you know that those racists and neo-Nazi’s will try to get into government), then where the hell are people supposed to go?

Sure, there may be a handful of landlords who own a lot of land and it’s hard to avoid them, but that’s more telling of an oligarchic society and its problems, and not that private ownership is a problem.

Some of those examples from history weren’t great. If anything, they (aside from the tribal ownership of land) more-so exemplify things that seem to frustrate you: few people own the lands and they’ve dickheads about it, but we are left with no choice.

And just because it never happened in the past, doesn’t mean that it’s bad. Personal property isn’t private property. You can use a piece of land how you wish, but you don’t own it forever: you can use it as long as you’re still using it for your personal needs. This “you” can expand into a group, eg a family, and as long as this group still continues to use it directly, it’s “theirs”. No small private group of people can “own” a piece of land and demand those on it to pay for it.

As for saying that tracking private ownership of land is bureaucratic, that doesn’t sound too different from how it’s inherently bureaucratic that the government owns it all.

AFAIK, the author isn’t anti-proprietary. His goal with the newsletter is to share news that relates to self-hosting, which isn’t limited to FOSS, which is something he mentioned in one of his recent newsletters (it’s a common criticism he gets apparently). And there’s the reality where the vast majority of the source for selfhosted software are hosted on Github.

Two or three years sound somewhat optimistic to me. It’s quite likely that it’s a really rough estimate. Fact is, AWS has a crap ton of little features that they add over the years, displacing smaller players or outright buying them, so that they can lock you into their service. I reckon that there’s also the need to re-engineer some of these services to rid themselves of those lock-ins.

I don’t think that really answers the question and feels like a nothing burger. There would be no land appreciation when it’s all owned by the government. Its value is purely perceived and never realized in such a scenario.

And to be fair, land is somewhat of an interesting case. Suppose you own a piece of land and have no debtors, but you’ve died without descendants or relatives, and certainly without a will, wouldn’t the government just take over that? In essence, the government has a holding on the land, and you’re holding an indefinite lease that can be transferred. Expropriation is simply a mechanism for the government to take back the lease, but they are still obligated to pay to owners. To the owners, it sucks, cause you might really like the piece of land, or that your livelihood depends on it. Hence the conversation should be about fair compensation or equivalent exchange, and a strong scrutiny of expropriation (provably worthy investments being done by the government).

That said, that does depend on your political beliefs on individual freedom. I believe that we should have the freedom to be where we want and do what we want, but to the extent where it doesn’t cause others pain, discomfort, or jeopardy of any sorts (physical, mental, societal where appropriate), or when there is something that would benefit us, collectively. Being asked to move, and being paid fairly to do so, is annoying and disruptive, but if all we do is reject every attempt of improving public spaces and infrastructure projects, then I think we have a more serious problem than just land ownership.

Of course, every case of expropriation should be fully scrutinized. Do these people HAVE to move? There are many ways to incorporate existing infrastructure with new ones.

I simply don’t believe or trust that governments will forever be benign, and full ownership of land by only the government is no different from the age of kings: all it takes is one bad king to ruin it all.

Even in an anarchic society, there’s still a sense of ownership of space: this is where I can be alone by myself, and that my right to privacy in my space is respected.

Then how would your proposition change anything, except that the government would have even less reason to pay private citizens after forcing them to move?

And then we attract pricks into the federal government who ignore rules and they evict everyone overnight so that they can build a resort for themselves.

Look, I get the sentiment, but this sort of centralization is scary.

Oh the old Comedy certainly died. This new one has another name: Real Life.

STFU and GTFO Porkstra